Secret Sauce

Boost The Immune System And Cut Down On Binge Drinking

A recent study in America has discovered that the immune system becomes dangerously weak after sessions of binge drinking and the body is at risk from infection. Experiments conducted during the study on laboratory mice and cells had the results that two serious components of the immune system were totally blocked for 24 hours and sometimes longer after the binge drinking had stopped.

Stephen Pruett, of the veterinary medicine department of the University of Mississippi, and Ruping Fan, of Louisiana University were involved with the study and they have found that the immune system did not recover to its fully functional mode for at least 24 hours after the last dose of alcohol had been administered and in some samples, the effects lasted much longer than this. This lowering of the immune system can lead to things like common colds, tiredness and serious infection in some cases.

This is because the two components which are affected by heavy drinking are interlinked. The immune system responds to foreign bodies by using the TLR4 protein receptor which is one of the components damaged by binge drinking. Our immune system is unable to fight against bacteria and viruses which enter the body when this receptor is blocked after binge drinking. Secondly, the production of cytokine is retarded during and after periods of high alcohol consumption. The immune system only knows of any infectious bacteria or viruses in the body when it is warned by cytokine.
If the body does not know there is an infection looming because of a lack of cytokine and then it does not have the means to fight off the infection because the TLR4 receptor does not boost the system’s response, our health is at serious risk.

There are many things you can do to boost the immune system. Eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly and supplementing your diet with any supplements if necessary will all help you to keep your immune system functioning at its highest level. However, the way you can really boost the immune system is to cut out any binge drinking, keeping your alcohol consumption to a minimum and looking after yourself if you do drink too much on a night out or at a party.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 12:11 am and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.